Safe dart games which may be used without fear of personal injuries or property damage are well known and becoming increasingly popular. Such dart games use unique safe darts which closely resemble conventional metal darts in appearance, flight characteristics and target striking characteristics, but which are virtually incapable of causing personal injury or damage to walls, furniture or other surroundings adjacent the dart board. The darts are identical to standard metal darts except that the safe darts include a slender tip made of flexible plastic and formed with a comparatively blunt point so that when a misthrown dart strikes a solid object, the flexible tip deflects laterally and the blunt point prevents the tip from penetrating the object. The misthrown dart hence bounces harmlessly away from the object rather than causing injury or damage.
The dart boards that are used with such safe dart games basically consist of an array of target plates molded with a large number of closely spaced holes which correspond substantially in size to the external diameter of the tip of the safe darts. The target plates of such dart boards are designed in such a way that when a dart is thrown at the board, the tip almost invariably enters one of the holes and remains there until it is removed. The dart board is also adapted so that the tip of a thrown dart can find its way into one of the holes on the target plates even if the tip initially strikes the plate in an area between adjacent holes.
As is conventional with such dart boards, the target plates are divided into different scoring areas with immediately adjacent scoring areas of target plates being of different colors. This requirement poses a significant problem to the dart board manufacturer from the point of view of assembly of the dart board components, because it is more convenient and economical to separately mold the individual target areas in their required colors rather than assemble the overall target area for the dart board first and then paint or color it so as to delineate the various scoring areas. Hence, according to common industry procedure, the distinctive scoring areas which constitute the overall target area of the dart board are separately molded in their required colors.
During assembly of the board, each of these scoring areas is then individually positioned into its corresponding position within the infrastructure that supports the dart board. This constitutes an extremely laborious and time consuming procedure since a conventional `around the clock` dart board needs 81 separate scoring areas to be defined on its overall target area. The assembler on the dart board assembly line not only has to go through 81 separate motions of picking up a single scoring area and then placing it onto the target area of the dart board, but has to be alert enough to position the scoring area of the right shape as well as the right color into the corresponding position on the dart board target area. Not surprisingly, such conventional methods of assembly take an undue amount of time, are prone to a variety of assembly mistakes and constitute an uneconomical, laborious and inconvenient method of assembly. Thus, there exists a need for an improved method of assembly of the various differently colored scoring areas of the dart board which removes the disadvantages inherent to conventional assembly procedures.